{"id":438809,"date":"2026-09-17T13:26:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/438809\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T13:26:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:26:22","slug":"el-paso-burial-site-of-first-black-man-to-vote-in-illinois-confirmed-121-years-after-his-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/438809\/","title":{"rendered":"El Paso burial site of first Black man to vote in Illinois confirmed 121 years after his death"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Lizzie Seils \/ WGLT A cardboard cutout of David Strother sits in the window of the Project XV voting rights museum in El Paso. Strother was the first Black man to vote in Illinois after the 15th amendment was adopted.<\/p>\n

More than 120 years after his death, local historians finally feel confident of the burial spot for the first Black man to vote in Illinois.<\/p>\n

A reddish granite headstone sits in a quiet plot near the back of El Paso\u2019s Evergreen Cemetery. It proudly bears the name David A Strother.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe voted on Monday, April 4, 1870 in an El Paso<\/a> City election,\u201d the stone reads. \u201cThe first Negro ballot ever cast as a result of the fifteenth amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The El Paso American Legion Post 59 erected that stone in 1954 as part of El Paso\u2019s centennial celebration. Strother\u2019s obituary and cemetery records claim he was buried there along with his brother, mother and wife. However, there were no original headstones for any of them.<\/p>\n

Barb Lancaster with the Project XV<\/a> voting rights museum in El Paso has wondered for a long time if Strother and his family are resting in that plot.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Lizzie Seils \/ WGLT Barb Lancaster, board member of Project XV. Lancaster said she has studied the Strother family\u2019s history for so long that they feel like family to her.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy family and friends would tease me that I love my dead people and it\u2019s true, I do. And they don\u2019t have to be relatives, although I\u2019ve studied David and his family enough that they do feel like family to me,\u201d Lancaster said.<\/p>\n

On a comfortable August morning, several volunteers and local history buffs gathered around Strother\u2019s 1954 headstone to find out for certain if he and his family lay underneath.<\/p>\n

Lancaster said the Project XV board was introduced to Illinois State University anthropology professor Logan Miller through the McLean County Museum of History.<\/p>\n

The group won\u2019t have to break ground to solve the mystery. Miller presented what looked like a three-wheeled baby stroller with a safety-orange box sitting on the ground where the baby carrier would sit.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lizzie Seils \/ WGLT Illinois State University Anthropology Professor Logan Miller. Miller brought ground-penetrating radar device to El Paso to help Project XV volunteers look for Strother\u2019s burial site.<\/p>\n

That orange box was a ground penetrating radar device. Miller said it works by emitting waves underground and measuring how quickly or slowly those waves bounce back. That can show if there are any disturbed soil or stones underground.
\u201cWhat we get are blobs, basically,\u201d Miller said. \u201cSo ideally, we see a rectangle and then at the head a smaller square that would be a [grave] marker.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Lizzie Seils \/ WGLT
A ground penetrating radar device which emits waves and measures their return time to look for objects underground.<\/p>\n

To get the best results, the group captured the radar readings in 20-centimeter \u201cslices,\u201d laterally and vertically across the 4- by 6-meter plot. The group rolled the ground penetrating radar device back and forth, over and over again, in straight lines.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lizzie Seils \/ WGLT Bloomington-Normal NAACP Chapter President Linda Foster-Caruth. Foster-Caruth is also a member of the Project XV museum board.<\/p>\n

Bloomington-Normal NAACP Chapter President Linda Foster-Caruth joined the search, pushing the device and helping other volunteers measure out 20 cm sections.
Foster-Caruth is glad to help tell Strother\u2019s story more than a century later.
\u201cWe always know there\u2019s a first, and to just think that he was it,\u201d she said, \u201cand he probably didn\u2019t think it. I think he just probably thought that \u2014 if I had to guess \u2014 he probably thought that \u2018I was just doing my civic duty.\u201d<\/p>\n

It actually took two attempts for Strother to cast his ballot. He arrived at the polling place alongside then-Mayor James Wathen, but the election judges did not believe the amendment was ratified and adopted.<\/p>\n

The judges sent for a copy of the amendment, according to Project XV, and then allowed Strother to vote after they confirmed it.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Strother took that leap of faith,\u201d Foster-Caruth said, \u201cand he took it a couple of times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just like the man the group seeks to honor and remember, the first attempt to search underground yielded few results. On the second run, though, Miller said the group found evidence of four graves underneath.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe GPR survey produced subtle yet clearly visible anomalies in the area in front of David Strother\u2019s monument,\u201d Miller\u2019s report read. \u201cThese subtle near surface and subsurface anomalies are consistent with burial practices in the late 1800s \u2013 early 1900s which likely included burial in a wood coffin and covering the burial with the same soil removed in digging the grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Courtesy of Barb Lancaster, Project XV A diagram showing the results of the ground-penetrating radar search. The moisture in the soil prevented the radar from travelling more than four feet underground.<\/p>\n

Lancaster said this does not identify the individuals buried below, but the numbers add up. They were looking for four burial sites and found four anomalies underneath.<\/p>\n

However, there is no evidence of original headstones for Strother, his mother, his brother or his wife. Lancaster thinks they all deserve headstones and will start fundraising to place a memorial marker for the whole family.<\/p>\n

\u201cDavid was a fantastic, amazing character, but his mother was, his brother was and his wife was, too. They all have really interesting stories and they all deserve to be remembered,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u00a0
\nAbout David Strother and his family<\/p>\n

Strother was born on Aug. 18, 1843, and died on March 12,1905. According to Project XV, he was born the son of an enslaved couple in Lexington, Missouri.<\/p>\n

As a boy, he worked as a cook and travelled the Mississippi River on a steamboat and eventually worked as a civilian cook with Company G of 17th Illinois Infantry.<\/p>\n

According to Project XV, 44 of the men in Company G hailed from El Paso and urged Strother to join them back home.<\/p>\n

He eventually set up shop as a barber. Strother married his wife, Elizabeth Gaines Strother in 1887. His mother, Leah, and brother, Charles, eventually joined him. Charles joined his brother\u2019s barber shop business. The original barber shop in Downtown El Paso has been renovated as one of Project XV\u2019s signature exhibits.<\/p>\n

Charles died in 1897. Elizabeth died in 1901, but it is unclear when Leah died.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lizzie Seils \/ WGLT A cardboard cutout of David Strother sits in the window of the Project XV…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-438809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}